#wizard's knot

[damn-anotherangel]

I wanted to do this Oath justice. It has gotten me through so much, and has shaped me so nicely, that I want to give it the best treatment I can, and give its author @dduane a piece of art that properly shows my thanks for all of her inspiration. I hope to ever improve. Thank you again.

[dduane]

Hello, I grew up reading the Young Wizards series and it shaped a lot of who I am as a person now. I was just wondering why you chose the specific knot you did for the wizards knot?

Well, for one thing it's mathematically interesting.

...Maybe this is the wrong end of the story to start from. (Though it is mathematically interesting...)

Early references to the Wizard's Knot in the books describe "a complicated sort of figure-eight mark". It takes a number of other forms as the series goes on, and I started to realize that I was going to have to nail the thing down more concretely... in some way that would allow it to exist both in a very simple form, and in versions more complex.

So the question "how is a complicated symbol also a simple one (or vice versa, depending on which you need)?" can only sensibly be answered in one cognitive realm: topology—specifically, the corner of that science known as knot theory.

It would be possible for me to go on at serious length about this, but probably (especially this late at night...) it's best for everybody if I don't get started. Briefly, though: I looked around the world of knots for a while and eventually found that the knot called the 7-4 knot was what I needed. It appears in numerous Earth-based cultures as “the Endless Knot” in an assortment of interesting forms, and it has a nice symmetry in all of them. But most importantly, its simplest forms can be written with a single long stroke of the pen* (or wand, if you're one of those YoungWizards-verse wizards who choose to use wands), just as that simplest figure-eight(ish) form.

Now, a perfect or exact congruency between these has to be come at by sort of (mathematically) squinting at both of them at once, sideways. But there often comes a time when, if you're the storyteller, you decide that you've come (as we say around here) "close enough for jazz"... and with a sigh you step away from the final resolution of a conundrum like this to deal with more important issues. Like plot. :)

...So there you have it. Hope this helps!

*Or Space Pen...

[sunrisenebula]

So I went and got this done today. 

[revisionlightning]

Got my goodies from the crossingscon team today!

[sunrisenebula]

Hey c: Just had a question about the keychains. Are all of them going to be glow in the dark? I chose the perk quite a while ago, and I don't think they were glow in the dark then. Thanks!

Yes, all of them are going to glow in the dark! I just had a bit of a delay getting the glowy plastic in so I wasn’t able to provide pictures of the glowing ones until recently.

I had placeholder pictures of the keychains in white plastic before (because I had to have at least some image of them to show). But they’ve always been intended to be glowy, and the text of the listing reflected that.

[dduane]

What would you say the Young Wizard series Fandom symbol is? Harry Potter have the deathly hallows, Percy Jackson has the trident, but what do we have?

The most likely candidate seems to be the Wizard’s Knot. People noticed the very simple image of it in the Errantry Concordance and started using it for jewelry, in 3D printing, even as tattoos.

I noticed this and said to myself “Yeah, that seems like a winner”, so as soon as I can get a truly symmetrical version of it*, it will be appearing on the covers of the YW New Millennium Editions when we recover them next year.

Here are a few 2D variants…

*I may actually have to sit down and do this thing on paper with a French curve, as KnotPlot is being incredibly cranky about it (I’m sure it can do what I want: the problem is figuring out how to tell it, as the documentation is… a tad sparse).  The image below is as close as I’ve managed to get to symmetrical so far.

[dduane]

In your post about KnotPlot you said that the 7/4 “prime knot” is often used as the Wizard’s Knot on Earth. Does that mean that other locations use different variations of the Knot? Would there be, for instance, a version of the knot more common to Wellakh?

Most likely there would.

I suspect that the only real requirement is that a local Wizard's Knot be one of the prime knots, as their defining quality is that they can't be decomposed / "untied" into more than one knot structure. They therefore intrinsically express the completeness of a spell and its structure as something which, once completed, can't fall apart.

Beyond that, a given culture may find one knot prettier than another, or easier to draw, or more sympathetic / evocative to some aspect of a local number system; or symbolic because of a shape-similarity to something important in the culture. There's plenty of wiggle room on this.

[devieklutz]

So I made a bookmark and then made it into a headband. It can go either way really. ^,^